RED's Motion Stabilizer Presents

Great Moments In American History

Continuing our theme of motion filters and astronauts, I wanted to show you a piece of video (film, actually) that shows one of the great moments in American history, the launch of Apollo 11. Here it is.

While the moment itself is heartwarming, the clip is stomach-churning. It's a helicopter shot, and wanders all over the place. This is easily remedied in Boris RED, though, with the Motion Stabilizer filter. As with the Motion Tracker filter, you can download this movie and play along by creating a project in the RED Engine with the dimensions of 360x243.

Motion Stabilizer is actually the opposite of Motion Tracker: Motion Tracker picks a point and follows it; Motion Stabilizer picks a point and makes everything move in relation to that point. This is actually reflected in how the filter is applied. Instead of applying the Motion Stabilizer filter to a clip, I'm going to apply a CLIP to the FILTER.

Here's what I mean. I clear the tracks from my RED timeline (select all and delete -- note that you can also make "Start With Empty Timeline" your default in the Interface tab of the Preferences -- this is in fact what I've done). I then apply the Motion Stabilization filter. By default, the source media is the V1 from your NLE, which may well be exactly what you want. If you're working along in the standalone RED Engine, simply use the Media selection pop-up menu under the orange V1 icon to select Launch.mov, or the footage of your choice.

From there, the Motion Stabilizer is even easier to use than Motion Tracker, which is already outrageously easy. As I did in the Motion Tracker filter, I click on the television icon for the filter track, which opens up a preview monitor with my motion analysis tools.

The obvious point to use in this clip is "the rocket's red glare," as it were: locking the rest of the image down, using the center of the fireball from the rocket as my reference point.

Noting that my CTI is on the first frame, and that the option to animate keyframes is ON (that is, the "key" icon on the Controls window is in the UP position), I move the center point of the region over the center of the fireball, and click the Analyze button.

A few seconds later, I'm done.

Sort of. As you can see, the rocket is now steady as she goes, but the rest of the frame has had to move quite far to accommodate it.

Let me pause to make a note about truth in demos. I saw a motion stabilization demo from Somebody Big in this field, but the correction needed was so gentle (only a few lines) that the exposed part of the background was lost in the overscan on the TV monitor!!

Not me, man. I know that when you need help stabilizing footage, you might need a LOT of help. The good news is that this is exactly what Boris has for you.

More than one way to stabilize a cat
There are a couple of ways to approach this. Since the rocket is mostly moving vertically, I can got to the Advanced tab of the Motion Stabilzier filter and try to stabilize only the horizontal (X axis) motion. At least then the footage won't wobble back and forth, and I'll have more vertical motion. Here's the result of that setting.

As you can see, the result is less than satisfying. There's so much motion, even vertically (the Y axis) that I really need both on. But you can see that there may be times when you only need, or want, to stabilize in one dimension, say a tripod pan with a vertical bump in it, and that RED can take care of it for you.

Here's another possibility that may work, depending on your footage. Also on the Advanced tab, there's an option for scaling the source video. If you only need a few percent, you can usually get away with this -- Boris renders are exceptionally clean.

But there are limits to the amount that any pixel-based image can be scaled. It would take about 25% to get this video big enough to cover all the gaps. It looks fine for a web render like this, but I don't think you'll be shocked to discover that this just won't do for full scale, full-rez video.

There's an old saying….
Although I haven't been doing so much of it lately, I started editing professionally in 1978. We geezers have an old saying, "If you can't SOLVE it, DISSOLVE it." The point is that you can sometimes direct attention away from the worst parts of your video. Boris has excellent tools for this very thing.

The most obvious course left to us is to add a mask. I can accomplish this in four clicks using the timeline buttons in RED 3GL, another of my favorite features in Boris.

The first click adds a solid color layer. (The default is to use the last color applied -- black if it's the first time -- but you can change it. Black works for me, though.)

Two, to select the Mask track in the Solid Color track. Three, to make a new Spline Primitive shape. Four, to invert the mask.

That's it. Four clicks and a I have a nice little mask to frame up my video. It gives the whole thing a nostalgic feel. Pause to enjoy that while you think about how long it would take you to create a rectangular mask with rounded corners in other graphics tools.

There's plenty I can do to animate the mask, of course, including the roundness of the corners. I can also scale the mask up, allowing me to see a little more of the video. I did this by toggling the animation of my keyframes off, grabbing the corner of the mask track in the Composite window, and shift-dragging to scale while constraining the proportions. (I could of course animate the scale of the mask, resize it disporportionately, and so on. But I didn't.) Because the spline mask is a vector shape, it will stay razor sharp at any scale, but I'm going to add a mild blur to increase my nostalgic feel.

Because the spline mask is a vector shape, it will stay razor sharp at any scale. By providing a border shaped a little like a TV tube, I've added something of a nostalgic feel to the clip. Here's the latest version.

It's coming along nicely, but looking at the movie closely, it looks a little TOO nostalgic. There's a lot of film grain (not the pleasant kind), and what appears to be some actual chunks of dirt, and a few waterspots. Too bad the water missed all the dirt, huh?

My good friends R, G and B
In the Motion Tracking tutorial, I showed you one kind of PixelChooser mask, which used region-based selections to create masks within filters. There's another kind of PixelChooser mask, and that's channel-based.

To see which channel to use, let me give you a brief tour of the red, green, and blue channels in an image. You can view these by selecting the pop-up menu on either the Composite window (for the whole effect), or for any individual track in the timeline. Since we haven't applied any filters affecting the color information of the final output, we're okay selecting the channel pop-up on the Comp window.

The Red channel generally contains the contrast range in an image.

Notice that the rocket's fire actually looks more distinct when we isolate the Red Channel. This can come in handy when you have more difficult footage to track: both Motion Stabilizer and Motion Tracker allow you to track the R, G, or B channels separately. When you need peak contrast to isolate elements to follow, this is the way to go. But I swear you're probably never going to have to do this.

The Green channel tends to contain the edge detail.

Notice, for example, that you can see more detail in the cloud plume on the right when compared to the Red channel. The flame is also markedly less distinct. You can still see it, but not nearly as well as in the Red channel.

The Blue Channel is what we're looking for at the moment.

This is the channel where noise tends to live, which you can see absolutely clearly in the upper right of the frame in particular. Truly nasty, in fact.

We can fix this by applying a gently blur, and limiting it to the Blue channel with PixelChooser. Apply the Gaussian Blur filter, go to the PixelChooser tab, and click the button marked M.

M is for Channels? Presumably it stands for "mask," but that's the button, regardless. Use the pop-up to select Blue, go back to the main tab and reduce the amount of blur just a bit, and we have a much, much better looking scene.

Boris Vector Paint: Stronger than Dirt
We can still clean up those big chunks of dirt and the water spot. Although the vector paint in Boris RED is primarily a graphic tool, it's more than up to the task of cleaning up this video.

Using the arrow keys to advance the CTI, I can see the biggest pieces of dirt. I then create a new Paint track, and go to the Brush tab. Take just a minute to look around the Brush tab, and note that ALL of these parameters are animatable. That's not the case in every application. There are many other animatable parameters for vector paint in Boris, including multiple strokes per path, multiple shadows, fill, jitter, and much more.

But in fact, I don't want to animate the parameters of my brush at the moment, so I toggle my keyframes to static again. First, I reduce the size of my brush to 3 pixels from the default of 5. Then I use the eyedropper to select a color near the first piece of dirt that I come to. Since we're getting ridding of dirt, I try to select a color just a tiny bit lighter than the surrounding vidoe. Once I've selected the color, the eyedropper automatically flips over to the brush tool, so I can paint to cover the dirt. One click is usually all it takes.

To keep the paint I've added from becoming a new layer of detritus later in the clip -- such as when the color of the paint no longer matches the underlying video -- I bring the start and end keyframes of the paint's face track to a frame or two on either side of the CTI. This is much easier if you go into the Track menu and turn "Snap CTI to Keyframe" OFF. Instead of having the CTI follow the keyframes as you move them (eek), you can leave the CTI parked wherever you want, and move the keyframes independently.

Although the length of the stroke and its color are animateable (as are fill, multiple outlines, multiple shadows, and much more), it's going to be much easier to catch all the dirt with a new layer of paint, each adjusted to a few keyframes long.

How much paint you add depends on two things: how good you are at painting (and I can almost certainly guarantee that you're better than I am), and how clean you want to get the clip. There's a general principle of cleaning, that the more you do, the worse everything else looks. And a general principle of cleaning up moving video, that the dirt might pass quickly enough not to be a problem, means that you should keep previewing to make sure you don't clean more than you have to.

For this rendered clip, I've added a few more layers of paint, and a blur to the mask, and I think it looks pretty good. When doing this demo in front of a live audience, I'll be honest -- I usually stop at the two worst pieces of dirt. For this rendered clip, I've added a few more layers of paint, and I think it looks pretty good.

Ask for the Moon
Is this clip perfect? No. But it's gone from absolutely unusable to quite nice indeed. Barring my discoursive detours, this demo was really just a handful of clicks: adding the Motion Stabilizer, a vector mask, two blurs (one on the mask, one on the video's Blue channe with PixelChooser), and a few layers of vector paint. This kind of cleanup is fast to build, fast to render, and looks great.

Even this is just a handful of the tools for treating video in Boris RED. It's a nice cross-section of features, though, including filters with built-in masks (PixelChooser), blurs of exceptionally high quality and speedy rendering, vector paint, motion stabilization, and vector masks. RED tools I didn't even get to include time filters, particle systems, 3D extrusion and compositing, and 2D and 3D titling.

We think it's perfectly reasonable to ask for the moon when you ask for an effects package, and we're delighted to give it to you in Boris RED.

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